Soarin’ Over Housing in Southern California: Home Prices Snap Back

One of my favorite rides at Disneyland’s California Adventure is called Soarin’ Over California. It’s a great ride for a variety of reasons, but one is that it provides a birds-eye view the state in quick takes without having to deal with the hassles of being on the ground.

We wanted to provide a similar experience for the U.S. housing market in 2013, albeit it without the actual experience of getting your feet off the ground a la the Disneyland ride. In a series of brief posts that will appear here over the next few days, we’ll take a look at several local housing markets across the country — starting today with Southern California — through the filter of home prices and foreclosure activity and with the insight of local brokers who are on the ground in each of these markets.

The data and broker videos in each of these posts are taken from a RealtyTrac-sponsored broker roundtable event in Park City, Utah, in August. The full broadcast of this event can be viewed in four parts on the RealtyTrac YouTube channel: www.realtytrac.com/youtube.

Southern California: Home Prices “Snapping Back”

“Our foreclosures are almost an insignificant part of our market now. Foreclosures and short sales were probably 60, 70 percent of the market a few years ago and today insignificant probably combined under 20 percent. And if a foreclosure is coming on the market it’s snapped up within a matter of hours. But the big thing that has caused our market to recover is the market in Southern California, perhaps across the country, but the market overcorrected. It overcorrected on the upside and it way overcorrected on the downside. And so we’ve seen a snap back in prices of probably 20 percent just this year. And that’s significant. We’ve seen a lot of homes go from $500,000 to $700,000 just in the matter of the last seven or eight months." -- Rich Cosner, President of Prudential California Realty